Colombia’s Marcha Patriótica: a politics of amnesia or apocalypse?

Though it was established less than two years ago, the Marcha Patriótica (MP), a Colombian left-wing political movement, is already on the brink of collapse. Or extermination, depending on whom you ask. From April 2012, when it was founded, through 4 January of this year, 29 of its leaders and most active members have been assassinated or forcibly “disappeared”— all but two of them in 2013 alone.

Yet rather than a relic of the dirty wars (1), the murder and disappearance of these left-wing activists has a tragic aura of familiarity in Colombia. Or worse, déjà-vu. Barely 25 years ago, close to 4,000 members (2) of the political movement Union Patriótica (UP) were gunned down when the FARC tried to enter mainstream electoral politics. Encouraged to lay down its weapons and sit for elections by the Conservative government of Belisario Betancurt, the FARC saw the first overture by any Colombian government as a perfect opportunity to wage “the combination of all forms of struggle” (3) through the ballot box. Their opponents — the paramilitaries, narco-traffickers and other criminal groups with ambiguous ties to the State — most emphatically did not (4).

Predictably, many survivors went back into the hills to continue the struggle through decidedly undemocratic means. Many more went into exile. As the government failed to prosecute or even investigate the vast majority of these murders, this retreat to the hills seemed a reasonable response to what some have labeled “politicide.” (5) The FARC’s critics, on the other hand, accuse it of using the memory of the slaughter as carte blanche to forestalling the peace negotiations when it suits them. This too is not hard to believe.

On 10 November 2012, however, the uses and abuses of history left the realm of academic debate and entered the real world — the streets of Soacha, a poor, sprawling slum to the south of Bogotá. Édgar Sánchez was on his way to meet a friend for breakfast when he was riddled with bullets by two anonymous gunmen. Sánchez, a survivor of the massacre of the Union Patriótica in the late 1980s and a Communist Party militant, was also a member of the recently founded Marcha Patriótica. His death was the first of many — and sadly, there may perhaps be many more.

Sheep or wolf?

Since its creation, the Marcha Patriótica has had a hard time dispelling the notion that it’s little more than a front for the FARC. Within a year of its inauguration, Minister of Defense Juan Carlos Pinzón was publicly accusing the MP of being both infiltrated and funded by the country’s largest guerrilla outfit — with resources from coca production and illegal mining in particular (6). “For months now the government has been seizing missives from this terrorist group outlining their conspiracy to infiltrate social organizations,” Pinzón told Señal Radio Colombia less two months after the MP was established. Yet the government and military were not the only ones to drive home the point. Substantiated or not, much of the media was also quick to take up the story.

In El Tiempo, the newspaper with the largest circulation in Colombia, seasoned polemicists such as José Obdulio Gaviria led the charge. Gaviria, a henchman of former right-wing president Alvaro Uribe and a first cousin of the deceased drug-baron Pablo Escobar (7), compared the Marcha Patriótica to Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence.” (8) In doing so, he comes dangerously close to inferring that the movement is little more than the ghost of the UP, another botched attempt to continue the “combination of all forms of struggle” before a peace accord is signed. Yet the metaphor also masks a darker warning. If the MP is no more than the “eternal recurrence” of the UP, then it is also heading toward a violent end (9). Is he right?

The MP, as the uniting force behind a large if loosely based network of social, political, labor, peasant and agrarian organizations (10) from around the country, was formed in 2012 at the behest of two old players in Colombian politics: a leftist wing of the Liberals (PLC) (11) and the Communist Party of Colombia (PCC) (12). For many, this was evidence enough it was in bed with the FARC - an accusation that is hard enough to disprove in the current political climate: like celebrity libel, such accusations stick with a vengeance. And indeed, many of those associated to the MP have had ties with peasant communities or labor associations that are not on warring terms with the FARC.

Take for example Andrés Gil, spokesman for the Farmer’s Association of Valle del Río Cimitarra (ACVC) and a founding member of Marcha Patriótica. In 2011, he organized a meeting of socially activist organizations in Barrancabermeja — the “oil-capital of Colombia” but also a historic bastion of FARC support (13). Since much of the military and government consider social or political activism of any sort as synonymous with subversion — much less the kind that goes on in politically contested cities — this was proof enough that the FARC had a hand in “infiltrating” the latest “mass-based political party.” (14) According to this view, the MP is but another Trojan horse enabling the FARC to manipulate the political mainstream without having to first lay down its arms.

It almost doesn’t matter whether or not this is true: in Colombia, public perceptions and impunity decide who lives and who dies. Faced with a known but unseen enemy, the MP has an existential decision to make. Dissolve itself in the interest of its members’ safety — as its leading figure and cofounder Piedad Córdoba has recently suggested (15) — or continue the long marcha and risk the destruction of its very base.

Fool me once, shame on you...

If the fate of the Unión Patriótica is anything to go by, the MP stands little chance against a foe committed to employing mass violence and a State unwilling to intervene to protect it. By the time the smoke cleared in the early 1990s, the UP’s political machine had been soaked in blood: two presidential candidates, eight congressmen, thirteen deputies, seventy councilmen, eleven mayors and thousands of lower ranking members had been killed — many of them in broad daylight (16). At the time practically no convictions were made, a fact that suggests more than complicity on the part of the State. That being said, a case was opened in 2010 to investigate the involvement of the head of the DAS, Colombia’s premier intelligence agency, in the murder of a left-wing presidential candidate in 1990. Whether or not anything comes of the case does little to reassure those wary of the State and its role in violence against the left in Colombia (17).

Yet the Marcha Patriótica is not one to disregard a history lesson. Piedad Córdoba, an ex-senator from the tumultuous region of Antioquia and a vocal and controversial co-founder of the MP, recently warned the public she may have to dissolve the movement in order to protect the lives of its members. “We are trying to determine if we can guarantee the lives of those who are with us,” Córdoba told the media on 18 January. “It’s not an easy decision to end the movement.” (18)

In the past 14 months alone, fifteen members have been killed by sicarios — common hitmen frequently employed in political and narcotrafficking murders and often no older than teenagers. But the rest were killed by the State: five by anti-riot police (19) during last summer’s nationwide farmers’ strike (20) — and another five in confrontations with the army during other agrarian stand-offs. According to the Attorney General, no one has been detained in relation to any of the twenty-nine murders or disappearances (21).

To be sure, this could also be a case of ‘false positives.’ That members of the MP were killed in confrontations with the military or police does not necessarily imply they were targets of the State; they may have died as a result of combating the Armed Forces rather than merely opposing them (during the agrarian strikes, for example). If this is the case, it would only be further evidence that some of these “mass-based political movements” have been infiltrated by groups — such as the FARC — that are at best hostile to the Colombian government. Yet until such claims are verified, this logic veers dangerously close to blaming the victim. Whatever the conditions in which they perished, the State is still pulling the trigger or indirectly condoning those who did. So is history simply repeating itself?

If at first you don’t succeed

The Marcha Patriótica emerged in early 2012 as a self-described “second and definitive independence movement” for Colombia. Promising to reverse unpopular trade agreements, stabilize food prices, institute land reform, provide reparations for victims of the armed conflict (22) and stem the tide of global (i.e. American) capitalism, it was not advocating a radical break from mainstream leftist thought in Latin America. Yet the MP was also a response to President Santos’s call for more “ideological pluralism” within Colombian society and political life (23). Hence the two-fold question that arises from such a stance: can the MP unify Colombia’s persecuted and fragmented left to achieve any of its stated goals? And, more importantly, will the government ensure its right to try? If the evidence from the past year is any indication, the answer is a resounding no.

As it stands, 200 of the Marcha Patriótica’s members are currently behind bars for suspected ties to the FARC, including several of its leaders (24). Whether or not they are guilty is slightly beside the point: until the government does more to ensure the physical safety of MP members not under lock and key, it will come dangerously close to proving the FARC correct: namely, the charge that the Colombian government does neither politics nor peace in good faith (25). When President Santos finally did agree to meet with MP leaders to discuss their safety concerns on 15 January, he made no promises to enhance security or investigate the murders or disappearances. Perhaps Piedad Córdoba was right to have asked him whether or not it was “possible to continue doing politics in this country without guarantees.” (26)

On Wednesday 22 January the FARC issued a statement from Havana criticizing the government for its failure to curb the extermination of the Marcha Patriótica. Or, to use their turn of phrase, the government’s failure to stop the MP’s via crucis — their Via Dolorosa. (Only in the country that produced Camillo Torres, the father of armed liberation theology, do Marxist guerrillas still issue criticisms laden with catechistic references). If the government cannot ensure the safety of the MP, they warned, the entire peace process risks ending in nothing but “farce or comedy, the drab hum of empty words babbling on about the spread of democracy.” (27)

Despite the president’s coolness, his second-in-command issued words surprisingly similar to those of the FARC. “Should the MP dissolve as a political movement in the face of threats and assassinations, it would be a grave loss for the prospect of peace and democracy in Colombia,” warned Vice-president Angelino Garzón the very same day (28). Assuring the Marcha Patriótica that the “State and Establishment would guarantee their safety,” he urged them to “push forward as a political movement and demand their right to express themselves and play an active role in the political system.”

Was Córdoba bluffing when she threatened to dissolve the Marcha Patriótica? If so, it might have worked. The day the newspapers first issued her statement, many had tacitly agreed that the MP should be brought to an end — though not out of solidarity. Faced with the choice of becoming politically irrelevant and safe or dead and sorry, many of its opponents would gladly see it take either.

In his closing remarks, Garzón reiterated the fact that restitution and reparations in Colombia would require “not only peace accords but real and meaningful steps toward truth, mercy and reconciliation.” Only then would “the criminal tragedy this country has lived through never repeat itself.” Fine words from a fine man, but are they enough to divert the march of history?

Evan Pheiffer

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From Saint Louis, Missouri, Evan Pheiffer is a researcher in conflict and political violence at the Centro de Recursos para el Análisis de Conflictos in Bogotá.

(1) The dirty wars refer collectively to the efforts of military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru to eliminate left-wing political movements by disappearing and murdering those suspected of belonging to or sympathizing with said groups. Though estimates vary, the dirty wars – campaigns of military governments against civilian populations – are estimated to have claimed 80,000 dead or disappeared victims altogether between the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and the end of the Brazilian dictatorship in 1986 (?). For more, see Dinges, John. The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. New York: The New Press, 2004.

(2) This is a very contested figure for obvious reasons. Though there is no consensus as to how many were killed, estimates range between 2,000 and 5,000. The Bogotá-based human rights NGO Fundación Reinicia is quoted in Semana, the capital’s most important weekly newspaper, as saying there were 5,400 victims, of which 2,800 were assassinated. El Tiempo, a centre-right daily from Bogotá, cites that there were close to 5,000 deaths in “Renace la Unión Patriótica,” 10 July 2013. The author is using the number consistently used in El Espectador, a highly respected daily in Bogotá.

(3) In Spanish, “la combinación de todas las formas de lucha” and the most famous stratagem-expression of the FARC.

(5) “The promotion, execution, and/or implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents… intended to destroy, in whole or part, a communal, political, or politicized ethnic group.” Barbara Harff first coined the term to refer to Hafez el-Assad’s targeting of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria in 1981-1982, when between 5,000-30,000 people were killed. Harff, Barbara. “Assessing Risks of Genocide and Politicide.” Peace and Conflict 2005, Monty G. Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr, eds.

(8) Though a theme in ancient Indian Philosophy later taken up by the Greeks, the notion that all of history repeats itself eternally – including the tritest, most mundane and excruciating moments of life – was made notorious by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

(14) In an aforementioned editorial, Gaviria quoted the Minister of Defense as having in his possession a note dating from September 2010 between two FARC commanders, “Alfonso Cano” and “Iván Márquez”, in which they conspired to seize “the political space created by Santos” by creating a “mass-based political party” – the MP – with which to manipulate the political system. When the Ministry was asked by the media to reproduce the note, there was no mention of the MP whatsoever. Osorio, Camila. “Marcha Patriótica, la nueva izquierda que nace con un estigma.” La Silla Vacilla 19 April 2012. For a copy of the note, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/lasillavacia/6946737284/sizes/l/in/photostream/